Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

More Than 2,500 Ships Clash in Asakai

I was eating dinner when the op got called, but my pal Gaff was along for the ride and gave me some updates as the evening progressed.

A snapsnot (broken out by alliances) showed as many as 2,667 players in the low sec system of Asakai, which sits in the Black Rise region of Caldari space. Gaff linked me this picture of the operation, which seemed to be going around. (More battle images here.)

Supercaps at Asakai

Of course, so many players in a single system was a bit of a change. The system stats from DOTLAN show a big spike in everything but NPC kills.

Jumps and Kills

This is another example of both the strength and weakness in EVE Online.

The game let more than 2,500 players converge on a single system and engage in battle.

The game was also bogged down with that unexpected load to the point that the time dilation feature, which slows everything down on the impacted node so the servers can keep up with the action , was itself not enough to keep things going slowly but smoothly. Extra lag, disconnects, and problems loading the grid were reported. And this affected people not in the system but in systems on the same node, which probably covers the whole of Black Rise.

As is often the case, news of such a big even spread quickly, and both The Mittani and EVE News 24 had live reporting about the battle in progress, while a thread about the battle made it to the top of posts on Reddit. (Though TEST is from Reddit, so go figure.) Included in the reporting was a count of over 3,000 ships in system at the very peak of the battle.

Of course, this all comes immediately after a week of escalating tensions between TEST and Goonswarm over a long simmering conflict between TEST and Goonswarm ally and CFC member Fatal Ascension. While a devastating sovereignty war was averted, there was a mutual reset between the two sides and shooting has been encouraged. TEST appears to have put the FA angle into their post battle propaganda.

Are FA Really Worth It?

The Mittani himself was a little more subdued about the battle results.

5 thoughts on “More Than 2,500 Ships Clash in Asakai”

That’s right. Faction Warfare is where it is all at because that is where all the DUST bunnies are. DBRB was going in to attack a Gallente militia fleet attacking a Caldari militia-held cobalt moon. Pandemic Legion, who we all know love Minmatar low-sec, aided their Gallente bros in their attack to capture the cobalt moon. Mass killing ensued.

The only question is this the end of the HBC since Fweddit, a Reddit corp, is part of the Amarr militia? Is that what the fight was about, which militia HBC will join because Montolio loves Amarr and Shadoo loves the Matari?

My semiweekly lowsec PI alt run takes me through that area, and I’d just set out to do some hauling when I remembered I’d seen a big PL presence in the area last week and checked map statistics. The massive “ships killed in the last hour” circle persuaded me that perhaps this wasn’t the best time to be flying through Asakai in a Crane.

The server load was so bad that disconnecting, or in my case forced disconnect when going through gates or warping, required anywhere from 15-45 minutes to reconnect and load system. It took me 1.5 hours to get through the two gates before Asakai. By the time I got back into the fleet, we had gone from 255 to 149 due to disconnects while jumping/warping. I was actually trying to target and fire my maelstrom’s guns for around two hours, and only managed 4 shots in that time. Modules ceased to work, targets didn’t lock–it was hugely frustrating. Some reports have tidi at a more realistic 1 to 2 percent. According to the rumour mill, lowsec has the least load support, and this was a suprise fight, so CCP had everything working against them. I had to abandon my guy in the middle of the fight after losing connection when warping–the FC told us not to reconnect and that there would be a rescue fleet later. PL and Test sat in system probing for pilots relogging much of Sunday.

Well, Wilhelm, I must say that you have finally driven me into looking into a few of the games fore which you have spoken so much of over the years. In 98 i picked up Ultima Online and I played it until I picked up WoW…when free to play came out i began to branch out but today I have broken down and downloaded both Everquest II and am downloading Eve Online as i right this. I hope your happy…I am about to be completely lost in space…well for the next 14 days at least.